Older blog entries for dria (starting at number 119)

I have been playing with PHP. I have also been fretting madly about my cat. I also spent $20 on photocopying (a lot of) D&D 3rd Edition character sheets, immersing myself in a massive high-school flashback. High-school was an awfully long time ago.

Grope the Mega.

Goddamn, I miss my old gaming gang. I also miss my cat. The latter, however, will hopefully be resolved tomorrow.

Then I get to work from home for a couple of days whilst I make sure he's okay. It's nice working for good people.

When I'm not playing with PHP, I seem to be playing with MySQL a lot. When I'm not playing with either of those, I tend to end up playing that bloody hyper addictive video game. Whatever you do, don't let Bast get pissed off.

My god, that works on so many levels.

For the record, I like PHP and MySQL. I've not quite advanced to the point where I'm terribly good at either, but I'm capable of hacking together enough web-gunk to build a passable site of sorts. Not bad for a week's erratic work, really. If inspiration strikes, I'll actually build actual things for actual websites. Wouldn't that be groovy.

I just ate a tunafish sandwich. I am now officially sick of tunafish sandwiches. Time to find a new default foodstuff.

"This dwelling cannot evolve because it does not have access to a second type of food."

At least they put a park around the corner.

Over the weekend I blew away everything on my laptop, repartitioned/reformatted, and reinstalled RH6.2 and Helix-GNOME 1.2. I'm really quite pleased. Of course, now I keep running into random crap like the fact I no longer have the Flash plugin installed for Netscape. Well foo. I also blew away my carefully-constructed mail filters. Not quite sure how I feel about that -- if nothing else, it's inspiring me to ditch another batch of random mailing lists that I feel compelled to be subscribed to, but which I never actually read.

My first 3rd edition D&D character creation (for purposes of trying to figure out the new rules) has turned out to be an Elvish Rogue (read: Thief). She's short and kinda wimpy, but dexterous as all git out. I had forgotten just how long it can take to create a new character. Right now I'm finishing up buying her gear. Then it's down to figuring out if I've got all the stats in all the right spaces and working up a nice character history. I think she'll be a city-bred orphan waif with a chip on her shoulder and an unhealthy love for the art of her craft, with an atypically strong religious bent (for a thief, at least).

Part of my PHP puttering is working towards building a weblog for myself so I can stop blithering about random stuff here. Maybe tomorrow.

Now that I think about it, I think my thief will have a pet rat named "Nimmet".

My cat is in the hospital and this is making me very sad and grumpy and difficult to be around. I want my cat back. More than that, I want my cat to get better and be healthy and happy. The apartment is very quiet these days.

Hoorah. Another advogato meta-discussion. Will wonders never cease.

[no, that's not sloppy punctuation, that is me exercising my grammatical license towards a specific yet oh-so-subtle end]

In more interesting news, I've discovered a host of other people who are maintaining diaries of their very own on this craziness we affectionately call the World Wide Web. Refreshing. Non-technical. Brutally narcisstic? Sure, why not? Twentyfirstcenturyschitzoidman. Here's a link. It contains other links. Hours of pure, unadulterated procrastination material lies rolling in ecstasy at your feet. Better than Survivor any day.

Reading: still mired in the tragic depths of Arthurian legend, waiting hopefully for the story to change, for the tragedy to be averted, for Arthur to rise up as noble and enlightened High King of Britain for an extended reign, Merlin watchfully by his side. But, but...if you took away the bit about the iceberg, would the story of the Titanic really be anything but the retelling of the first magnificent superliner? Would there, in other words, really be a story, or just several decades' worth of slick marketing brochures, hundreds of thousands of bright-eyed "trip of a lifetime" tourists with pictures to show their envious land-lubber friends, followed inevitably by a graceful retirement of the World's Largest Passenger Liner?

Had Arthur not been mortally wounded by his half-brother Mordred and spirited away to the shrouded isle of Avalon, would there be a story at all?

Playing: Pharaoh yesterday, and far too much of it. Discovered the "sandbox" scenario -- lots of resources, no enemies, no win conditions. It's just about building a city. It's really a great deal of fun. I'm going to learn how to use the scenario editor, I think, and build my own sandboxes. Just for fun.

It's Monday. Britian has been without Pax Romana for 1600 years. My cats are both doing well. The sun shineth, and it seems that the stifling humidity has decided to give us a break for the day. Could be too early to tell, of course. Weather is funny that way. Later, I'll probably find a software shop and pick up the Pharaoh expansion. I might even turn dria.org into a weblog so I can stop spewing my gibberings here.

I so rarely talk about anything related to Free Software, that it would seem appropriate.

May the Great Spirit watch over your refrigerator and keep it cold...world without end...adios.

Actually certified someone.

Doing laundry, adopted a new kitten to keep my other cat company (she's a cutie, named Nymue). Pictures of both my dearhearts here.

Reading piles of Arthuriana for no other reason than I've got lots of it, much of which I haven't read in years. Several current Arthurian series are also in the process of releasing the next book and/or finally wrapping up. I now have 47 books related to Arthurian legends, and a wish list of about that many more. God help me if I ever break down and start buying books online.

I'm trying to decide what to do with my day. I really should finish up the rebuilding of the Linuxchix site and get it all migrated over to the new server, etc., but it's a glorious day outside and The Gang is doing outside-social things. On the other hand, it's already afternoon, and I'm still trying to wake up. Hum. Groggy.

Things that make you go "hmm".

Hello to the FC gang, if you're out there.

Went to OLS, broke a tooth (temp filling in, root canal later), gave a talk about DocBook with dcm, damned near broke my toe, drank lots (not too much, unlike oh-so-many), met and talked with far too many Good People to list here (never mind link), had tons of fun.

Came home a day early (a week of that insanity is just too much), did laundry, made up with my cat (he always gets annoyed when I go to conferences without him), slept.

Future conference plans: none at the moment. OLS next year, for sure. I like the no-trade-show-all-techies aspect of it. I believe it can safely be said that a good time was had by all and no one died. Success!

I'm in Ottawa, at OLS, having fun and being generally random. Right now I'm waiting for some of my slackass friends to drag their butts outta bed so we can have breakfast (quickly becoming lunch).

I think my talk went well. I broke a tooth and had to go to the dentist immediately after we were done, so I wasn't in top form, but folks seem to think it wasn't horrible. Mostly because of dcm. He's fun.

[ed note on preview: I didn't break my tooth _during_ my talk. I broke it the night before, just to clear that up.]

Righto. Coffee...need coffee and lots of it right now. I'll post piles of photos when I get a chance (next week). There have been ample shenanigans.

Note: I was under no illusion of originality when I penned "welcome to the decline and fall of Western civilisation". I was just pointing out some lameass shit I saw yesterday which, collectively, put me over the teetery edge into fullblown cynic-mode. Here's another not-original idea:

There is nothing new under the sun.

On the other hand, the globalization seems to be destroying piles of what once could have been called, at the very least, "interesting".

And no, I didn't watch any TV yesterday. There are other sources of news and entertainment. I haven't watched TV since I moved to Montreal on April 27th, and haven't missed it a whit.

"There is no answer...let it be...the times were different...I was different. The whole bloody world was different. Yes. Is that what you want to hear? Killing was all I knew. Is that what you want to hear? NO, it is not enough. I killed -- but I didn't just kill fifty, I didn't just kill a hundred. I killed a thousand...I killed _ten_ thousand. And I was good at it! And it wasn't for vengeance. It wasn't for greed. It was because -- I liked it...when mothers warned their children that the monster would get them, that monster was _me_. I was the nightmare that kept them awake at night! Is that what you want to hear? The answer is yes. Ohh, yes."

Spot the irony, win a cookie.

stupid things I saw in the news today

1. green ketchup
2. the new harry potter release being "the most anticipated book of all time"
3. sonny barger (head of the Oklahoma Hell's Angels, made initially famous by HST's Hell's Angels: A Strange and Terrible Saga) being on a book tour
4. Tom Green being the new Gillette spokesmodel
5. Survivor and bigbrother2000
6. Sting selling out to Compaq

Three words, folks: bread and circuses. Welcome to the decline and fall of Western civilisation.

Blizzard finally released Diablo II. Wondering why I'm not online much? Wondering why I'm even worse at answering my email these past few days? Now you know. It's such a good game.

I make a kick ass stirfry, just so you know. My whole house now smells like ginger and sesame oil. Yum.

Tomorrow I call the shipping people to arrange delivery (finally) of my dining chairs. I'm still occassionally questioning my sanity in this "I need a huge dining suite" thing, but it's way too late now.

On the weekend I bought silverware, tableware, and a whole lot of wine glasses. I also (miraculously) managed to find a non-hideous table cloth that will actually cover my monstrosity of a table. Go figger...there are people out there who make stuff for stuff like that. Who woulda thought?

Reading a variety of things (me and my gnat-like attention span). The first is a non-fiction treatise on the archaeology of a variety of sacred sites which is very cool. I'm also wandering through a collection of KM-related articles. I've also started rereading a Richard Bach novel for no other reason than his novels make me feel just a little better about the world sometimes. Are his wacky theories true? Don't care, his books are like cookies.

Still having immense gobs of fun at work, which is always a good thing.

All in all, life is simply meandering along. There still aren't enough hours in a day, but that's normal. My projects are being slightly neglected, but sometimes you just gotta let things slide. As someone much smarter than me once said, "no one expects you to kill yourself doing volunteer work", so...nyah. I'm getting too old to stay up all night hacking.